Years ago, when I was first introduced to James Lee Burke’s prose, I balked. His style was not to my liking. Usually when this happens I don’t go back, but for some odd reason I did and I started reading with The Neon Rain and didn’t stop until I hit the end, of the, at the time, most recent book: Burning Angel. I’ve purchased and read every book since. I even have a black Robicheaux Dock & Baitshop hat that I wear while reading and sipping diet Dr. Pepper with cherries and lime wedges.

Stephen King calls Burke a gorgeous prose stylist.

As an undergraduate I covered local art events for The Athens Messenger and remember interviewing the director of a production of The Marriage of Figaro who told me that opera was conceived as an entertainment for the masses; that the audience would often stop the production and demand encores of particular songs. A star might sing a song a dozen times or more before the audience would allow the show to move on.

Reading Burke is like that. I started reading his latest, Robicheaux, and he stopped me on page two with a periodic sentence that is pure beauty.

He begins the paragraph ending the first section with the rhetorical question: Why should an old man thrice widowed dwell on things that are not demonstrable and have nothing to do with a reasonable view of the World? Then he steps off into the expanse:

Because only yesterday, on a broken sidewalk in a shabby neighborhood at the bottom of St. Claude Avenue, in the Lower Ninth of St. Bernard Parish, under a colonnade that was still twisted out of shape by Katrina, across from a liquor store with barred windows that stood under a live oak probably two hundred years old, I saw a platoon of Confederate infantry march out of a field to the tune of Darling Nelly Gray and disappear through the wall of a gutted building and not exit on the other side.

You can’t read a sentence like that just once or even three times; you have to loop back to the beginning repeatedly and feel veil part and allow yourself to fall into the words.

When I’m asked How long does it take you to write a novel? I’m never sure how to answer. My stock response is Somewhere between 15 years and 30 days. I had the kernel of the idea for my first—still unpublished—novel, how the first murder would take place, about 15 years before I finished Cold Silence. The actual typing, at 3,000 words per day, took a month. The truth of the matter, of course, is somewhere between those two extremes. Jon McGregor, writing in I have never been asked how I juggle writing and fatherhood for My Writing Day, relates much the same tale:

I read an interview in The New Yorker recently with Mikaela Shiffrin, one of the world’s leading slalom skiers, in which she talked about how little time she actually spends on the slopes. After accounting for the hours spent travelling between training runs, kitting out, warming up and sitting on chairlifts, even the most dedicated skier will struggle to get more than seven minutes skiing out of a training day. Contrary to the famous Malcolm Gladwell assertion that success requires 10,000 hours of practice, Shiffrin considers it the height of dedication to be achieving 11 hours of skiing over the course of a year.

In many ways, I like to think of myself as an Olympic medal-winning skier. Sometimes, when people ask how long it takes to write a novel, I wonder what they really want to hear. How long does it take to get to the bottom of the ski run? How much of that seven years was spent actually writing the actual text that went into the actual finished novel? In common with most people who work from home – and have more than one job, and have children in their lives – the mechanics of when and where I’m actually sitting at a desk doing work are complex and inconsistent. But even taking that into account, the work that actually happens at a desk is not always time spent actually writing. There are other things that happen.

When you don’t punch a time clock, when you can’t bill for the time you spent staring at space or driving from Cleveland to Ashville, North Carolina, well, what does count as time?

This may be the most brilliant discourse on writing time ever written (on time?):

There are other sorts of time, besides the writing time. There is thinking time, reading time, research time and sketching out ideas time. There is working on the first page over and over again until you find the tone you’re looking for time. There is spending just five minutes catching up on email time. There is spending five minutes more on Twitter because, in a way, that is part of the research process time. There is writing time, somewhere in there. There is making the coffee and clearing away the coffee and thinking about lunch and making the lunch and clearing away the lunch time. There is stretching the legs time. There is going for a long walk because all the great writers always talk about walking time being the best thinking time, and then there is getting back from that walk and realising what the hell the time is now time. There’s looking back over what you’ve written so far and deciding it is all a load of awkwardly phrased bobbins time; there is wondering what kind of a way this is to make a living at all time. There is finding the tail-end of an idea that might just work and trying to get that down on the page before you run out of time time. There is answering emails that just can’t be put off any longer time. There is moving to another table and setting a timer and refusing to look up from the page until you’ve written for 40 minutes solid time. There is reading that back and crossing it out time. And then there is running out of the door and trying to get to the school gates at anything like a decent time time.

Gladwell grossly over simplifies the challenge.

So, in the interest of changing my routine for 2018, I’m adding the reading of one essay by George Orwell to my Sunday mornings. I’ll be reading then in the order that they were were published—or at least as close to that order as I can ascertain since publication dates are not always readily available. Orwell’s Why I Write, however, breaks that pattern.

Somewhere among my books on writing I have a pamphlet copy of George Orwell’s Why I Write. While he wrote this in 1946, I’ve chosen to follow the lead of Sonia Mary Brownell, Orwell’s wife of 14 weeks at the end of his life and known as Sonia Orwell, in considering this essay first. In A Note On The Editing, she writes that the essay: [H]as been placed at the beginning of Volume I, as it seems a suitable introduction to the whole collection.

Orwell wrote:

Putting aside the need to earn a living [see Samuel Johnson on blockheads, JH], I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living. They are:

1. Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen—in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all—and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money.

2. Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. The aesthetic motive is very feeble in a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or writer of textbooks will have pet words and phrases which appeal to him for non-utilitarian reasons; or he may feel strongly about typography, width of margins, etc. Above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic considerations.

3. Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.

4. Political purpose—Using the word political in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

First, I was surprised that among Orwell’s four reasons, there does not appear what I think is the most important: the need to understand myself. Perhaps this is a factor of the—overly?—introspective time I live in.

Second, on Sheer Egoism: I don’t think anyone can be writer who is not vain and self-centered. I have long been fond of the notion that to be a writer you must to be willing to walk down Main Street starkers. You can’t do that if you are timid and selfless.

Third, on Aesthetic Enthusiasm: This has been beneath the surface for me across most of my writing. Only recently—in the last five, or so, years, have I begun to think along these lines. This is one of the reasons I’ve become so fascinated with Deliberate Practice.

Fourth, on Historical Impulse: This may touch on my idea of writers writing to understand themselves, but I think what Orwell is writing about is related to a desire for immortality. If I capture a moment, an event, an era, then I live, in a sense, beyond my death. (I am also puzzling over Orwell’s use of true facts. This is a writer who advised that If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. In our age of fake news and truthiness, the word true may be necessary, but I would have thought Orwell would have considered this redundant.)

Finally, on Political Purpose: I am in total agreement with Orwell’s position here. All writing is objective and all writing—beyond his proverbial railway guide—is meant to further a point of view.

For Orwell, of course, Political Purpose was the purpose that would shape the last dozen or so years of his life. We wrote:

The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects.

Remember, the Spanish war was personal for Orwell. He didn’t report on the war, he didn’t write about the war, he fought in the war. As a volunteer. No writer can be objective about a conflict in which the writer fired bullets at an enemy. He continues:

What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, “I am going to produce a work of art.” I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.

These were the emotions that brought Animal Farm and 1984 out of Orwell’s imagination, not, however, as journalism, but as literature.

But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience. Anyone who cares to examine my work will see that even when it is downright propaganda it contains much that a full-time politician would consider irrelevant. I am not able, and do not want, completely to abandon the world view that I acquired in childhood. So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information. It is no use trying to suppress that side of myself. The job is to reconcile my ingrained likes and dislikes with the essentially public, non-individual activities that this age forces on all of us.

This was true for Orwell in 1946 and this is true for any writer worth a damn in 2018.

Coming next week: The Spike…

Astronaut, and Navy veteran,* John Watts Young died Friday from pneumonia. Young went into space six times (seven if you count lifting off from the Moon) as part of the Gemini (nos. 3 and 10), Apollo (nos. 10 and 16) and the Space Shuttle (nos. 1 and 9) programs.

I watched all six launches and returns. The first shuttle launch on 12 April 1981 when I was an undergraduate at Ohio University (the only time I skipped any classes) was particularly thrilling because we had been Earthbound for so long.

*That Navy pilots are the best in the world—no one else lands a screaming fighter on the pitching deck of an aircraft carrier at night in a storm—is a fact. As I reviewed Young’s career I noticed that on the list of the dozen people who have trod the lunar surface, eight were Navy veterans.

Young was one of the giants.

Sarah Silverman may have been reading Celeste Headlee’s We Need To Talk.

Via Mano Singham…

Republicans in Congress face an existential crisis. I know that that was not the message David French meant to transmit in his blog post, but upon reflection, I think that is the 800 pound gorilla in Washington.

French, writing in Trump’s Impeachment Prospects Have Little to Do with the Law for National Review, explains:

[I]t’s time for some plain talk about impeachment. Any impeachment analysis will not ultimately turn on whether Trump violated the law. If we want to accurately analyze the prospects for impeachment, we have to understand that impeachment isn’t a legal proceeding. As my colleague Andrew McCarthy has explained in book-length detail, it’s a political process that’s influenced by legal arguments. The political branches of government make the decision. Members of the Congress—not the federal judiciary—determine if a president has committed “high crimes and misdemeanors” that require his removal from office.

Understanding this reality helps us understand the recent past. Why was Bill Clinton able to survive in 1998 in the face of overwhelming evidence that he committed perjury and obstructed justice? He was a popular president governing in a time of peace and prosperity. His average approval rating for his second term was a whopping 61 percent. House impeachment managers came forward with ample evidence of misconduct, but there was no chance that Democrat senators would vote to convict. Not only did the public (and much of the media) back the Democratic party in spite of the law, they arguably voted to punish Republicans for their impeachment efforts in the 1998 midterms.

What about Richard Nixon? As the Watergate scandal drip-dripped into the public square, overwhelming evidence of guilt accumulated, and the media thirsted for the president’s political blood, his approval rating plunged. He maintained a “loyal core” of 25 percent, but his disapproval spiked into the mid-sixties. Both men violated the law, but two different presidents operating in two different political environments achieved very different outcomes.

The lesson to take isn’t “unpopular presidents get impeached.” After all, George W. Bush hit dismal lows in his second term, but he never faced a realistic impeachment threat. The lesson instead is that the combination of credible claims of corruption or abuse of power, opposition-party control, and low public approval can drive a president out of office [Emphasis mine, JH]. Alter any one of these factors, and the president stays.

French’s second requirement—opposition-party control—is the keystone here and the reason that the 2018 congressional elections will be the most hotly contested (and expensive) in our nation’s history; if President Donald John Trump is still in office come September.

Exercising Section Four of the 25th Amendment, of course, is even further from any rule of law but may be how the Republican Party saves its bacon in November.

If you don’t already subscribe to Jill Miller Zimon’s Writes Like She Talks, you should. I’ve enjoyed reading Jill’s post this week after a year-long blog hiatus. In her weekend post Jill writes:

Thank you to everyone reading WLST. On one hand, I can’t believe I didn’t write a single word here throughout 2017. On the other hand, I know exactly why I didn’t and will write more about that in future posts.

I will publish daily on the weekdays but other than this note, I do not expect to post on the weekends with any regularity, if at all. If you’ve got ideas of what you’d like to read, please feel free to let me know in the comments or email me….

For her first week back, Jill posted:

And, oh, that quote under her banner? That’s from Eric Fingerhut.

So, I’ve been deep diving in The Guardian archives and found what I think may be the first bylined piece by Oliver Burkeman for that publication. Published on 12 October 1999, A tale of mice and mucus is all about what we call The Common Cold.

The name, as Burkeman notes in his text, is problematic since at the time of his writing there didn’t seem to be more than a passing connection between the viral infection and the dropping temperature of Autumn and Winter.

Marissa Fessenden, writing in There Is A Scientific Reason That Cold Weather Could Cause Colds for Smithsonian suggests that the science is much clearer on that topic:

if you’d like to get technical, a cold can be called nasopharyngitis, rhinopharyngitis or acute coryza. Often, it’s an infection with rhinovirus, but more than 200 other viruses can cause the coughing, sore throat, runny nose and sneezing that we call the common cold. Since colds have long been associated with the chilly, wet weather of winter, that’s likely where they picked up their easily recognized name.

More recently, humans have recognized that viruses are the true cause of colds and speculated that the close contact with others when we are forced indoors by the weather might be to blame for the cold-season association. But the old folk wisdom might have some truth: Researchers have just found a way to explain how getting cold might give you a cold.

Rhinoviruses, which are the most common cause for colds, are better able to reproduce at temperatures just below the body’s 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

So, cold is an appropriate moniker.

Man colds, however, are a different matter…

When I first saw this cartoon my mind went to Celeste Headlee’s We Have to Talk. I’ve since finished reading the excellent book and posted all of my notes to my electronic chapbook. I think this bit, as difficult as it will seem to contemplate, applies:

SHOW RESPECT: In order to show respect, you’ll have to view the other person as a human being, deserving of respect. And you’ll need to find a way to empathize with them., in spite of your disagreements. One way to do this is to assume that everyone is trying to bring about some kind of positive result in their lives. p. 69

You can practice your empathy skills by watching a video of a public figure you don’t agree with. [I picked Jim Renacci] Watch a speech given by that person or an interview they’ve done, and focus on seeing that person as someone trying to accomplish something they believe to be good. From their point of view, their end goal is positive and constructive. Try to imagine what that end goal is. Focus on their positive intentions. p. 70

Watching nearly an hour of Jim Renacci at the City Club the first time was painful and nauseating. But I stuck with the task and then repeated the experience. Several times Each time keeping Headlee’s words before me. It took a few times, but now I do see Renacci as someone who sees his point of view, his end goal, as positive and constructive. I still vehemently disagree with him, but I think I’m coming to understand how he got to where he is and where he wants to go.

You should gives this a try.

A friend has an old-style steel safe in her basement that contains, among other precious items, cash. “Cash is king,” she told me. I don’t keep anything like her stash, but I keep a small amount of cash around for paying service providers like plumbers, roofers or mechanics. One of the benefits is that they typically offer a discount for cash, usually an amount close to what they would lose to the transaction fee charged by the credit card company.

One of the truths about equality in the United States is that a dollar spends the same way whether your annual income is $10,000 or $10,000,000,000. That may not be true in the future.

Ralph Nader, in Corporate Coercion and the Drive to Eliminate Buying with Cash, writes:

“Sorry we’re not taking cash or checks,” said the clerk at the Fed Ex counter over a decade ago to an intern. “Only credit cards.”

Since then, the relentless intensification of coercive commercialism has been moving toward a cashless economy, when all consumers are incarcerated within a prison of corporate payment systems from your credit/debit cards to your mobile phone and very soon facial recognition.

“Terrific!” say those consumers for whom convenience and velocity of transactions are irresistible.

“This is nuts!” say a shrinking number of free-thinking consumers who are unwilling to be dragooned down the road to corporate captivity and coercion. These people treasure their privacy. They understand that it’s none of any conglomerate’s business—whether VISA, Facebook, Amazon or Google—what, where, when and how consumers purchase goods and services. Or where and when they travel, receive healthcare, or the most intimate relationships they maintain. Not to mention consumers’ personal information can be sent to or hacked around the globe.

Cash-consumers are not alone in their opposition to a cashless economy. When they are in a cab and ask the driver how they prefer to be paid, the answer Continue Reading »

In his interview with Rachel Martin, Dan Harris remarks:

People want to do meditation especially at this time of year—the whole “new year, new you” thing. But they feel like it’s just another thing on their to-do list that is further stressing them out, which of course defeats the whole purpose.

My answer to this fear is I’ve got good news and even better news. The good news is that I think five to 10 minutes a day is a great meditation habit, and I’ve spent a lot of time talking to the neuroscientists who study what meditation does to the brain. They haven’t cracked the dosage question fully, but generally speaking, [the scientists] say, “Yes—five to 10 minutes should be enough to derive the advertised benefits of meditation.” So that’s the good news. The better news is that I truly believe one minute counts, and that it doesn’t need to be one minute every day. You can shoot for daily-ish.

I’ve been a 40-minues a day meditator since high school. I have, at times, gone for much longer. On retreats I may go five or six hours a day and several years ago I upped my allotment to 90 minutes a day for a few months because of some personal issues I was working through.

Having said that, I like what Harris says about how length of time is much less important than frequency. A person who meditates one minute a day for 40 days is much better off than a person who meditates for 40 minutes for a single day and then stops. I think of Leo Babauta’s advice here is spot on. He writes:

A common habit that too few people actually do is flossing daily. So my advice is just floss one tooth the first night.

Of course, that seems so ridiculous most people laugh. But I’m totally serious: if you start out exceedingly small, you won’t say no. You’ll feel crazy if you don’t do it. And so you’ll actually do it!

That’s the point. Actually doing the habit is much more important than how much you do.

So, one minutes a day? Just do it.

I look at the coverage of Mayor Frank Jackson’s inaugural of his fourth term and I see and hear the same old shit.

Not even a note of a change, direction or energy.

It’s sad sack Jackson mayor of a sad sack city that has lost its sense of civic pride, other than how many new beer concoctions are we able to report. Or the increased population of downtown as the rest of the city shrivels.

The start of his fourth and historic term as mayor could have signaled a time when he refreshed his staff by making changes, getting rid of those who have been there too long and finding fresh faces with new ideas.

But that’s not Frank Jackson. Steady as she goes. Who knows where.

And what’s seriously wrong is that the caretaker type of government gets no serious reaction from community leaders or the news media.

Jackson beat the two possible challengers rather easily—Jeff Johnson and Zach Reed. But the miserably low turnout in the primary and the general election gave the correct message: Who cares? Why bother.

That’s a sad place for Cleveland to be. Not too much unlike its football team. Winless wonders.

Cleveland Magazine had an interview with Jackson by Sheehan Hannon. He asked about the judgment of Jackson’s loyalty (I’d call it lethargy) as both a positive and negative attribute. Here is part of Jackson’s response. I believe it reveals not loyalty or the lack of it. It shows the failure so evident with Jackson of avoiding a necessary decision:

People bring up [executive assistant to the mayor for special projects Martin] Flask and [director of public safety Michael] McGrath a lot. Well, they say I m overly loyal to them because I didn t fire them [after the police shooting of Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams]. What they re saying is why didn t I throw them under the bus to save my political ass? Well, is that 99 percent loyal, but I got that 1 percent that allows me to throw you under the bus to save my political behind? Well, I don t understand that.

I had a pastor, of all things, come to my office one day. He says, This is the way you do it, Mayor. You do the same thing the mayor of Chicago did. You create a task force, and you ask the man to resign, and you give responsibility to the task force to look into this situation. And then you praise the man as he resigns and you give him a key to the city or something, give him an award. He said, And nobody will know, Mayor, that you did what you did. They ll say that you did the right thing.

You know what my response to the pastor was? I will. I will know that, to cover my political butt, I threw that man under the bus when he did nothing wrong. So tell me about this loyalty thing.

Jackson avoids DOING. And we have to face four more years of this dreadful drift.

The city’s murder rate is down three but no one has examined its many empty buildings so maybe it’s up. Certainly, there’s a Wild West feel to so much of the city. But who really cares?

Let’s have a parade—“Jackson: mayor forever.” As long as he doesn’t change.

Happy New Year, folks.

By Roldo Bartimole…

Lt. Colonel Richard Sharpe, has a more personal perspective on the epic battle…

When I was in my early teens, and later in college, I had hamsters as pets. Anyone who has had a pet rodent know the scree, scree, scree sound of the exercise wheel to nowhere. Rodents never learn how to get from nowhere to now here. Humans can learn that lesson. The skill is recognize that there is no future, there is no past; there is only now. And when you learn to be here now, the unhappiness dissipates like smoke.

This is the lesson that Robert Wright has learned.

Underlying it all is the happiness delusion. As the Buddha emphasized, our ongoing attempts to feel better tend to involve an overestimation of how long better is going to last. What’s more, when better ends, it can be followed by worse—an unsettled feeling, a thirst for more. Long before psychologists were describing the hedonic treadmill, the Buddha saw it. p. 41

From Why Buddhism Is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment by Robert Wright

When was the last time you pondered where you were and were able to grasp here?

Previously…

Found in my electronic chapbook.

Robert Wright, Why Buddhism Is True

In the late ’70s in San Diego, the place to be if you were a Dungeons & Dragons player was the home of Dave Brewer, known as the Brewery. We would gather there Friday evenings and often play until Sunday evening, living on beer and a wide ranging assortment of snacks with occasional forays to McDonald’s. I have a lot of fond memories—and gaming materials—from those days.

‘Tis the season and all that. Because I took a one-day retreat at River’s Edge last month, I’m now on the mailing list for their newsletter, The Edge. The January issue offers three tips for not setting yourself up to fail if you made any New Year’s resolutions.

Eric Zimmer, writing in 3 Keys to Making New Year’s Resolutions Stick (even if you’ve tried before and failed), suggests:

Can you guess the difference between people who are successful with their New Year’s resolutions and those who aren’t?

If you guessed strong willpower, a doctorate degree or secretly having superpowers, you’re wrong.

It’s pretty simple, actually. There are 3 things that they do that the folks who give up by January 15th don’t do. Want to know what they are?
First, take small steps.

Leo Babauta says, “Make it so easy you can’t say no”. Break your new habit down into baby steps. Make these steps so small and easy that you don’t need motivation to do them. Sometimes the motivation comes AFTER you engage in the behavior. You may think at first that you’re not making much progress or that you can Continue Reading »

I’m a great fan of Oliver Burkeman and I’ve had this particular essay languishing in my Pocket file (which I cleaned out and deleted this morning) for a considerable time. That I found this piece on New Year’s Day is fitting. Below is an excerpt, but you really should read—and reread, as I plan to do after I finish this post—the whole essay. Enjoy!

Burkeman, thinking in Misery, failure, death and a slap in the face. Great advice for life from James Hollis for The Guardian, writes:

As a teenager or young adult, I suspect I’d have been equally annoyed. But I discovered Hollis at the right time, a few years back, and his writing was a bracing draught of reality, a rousing slap in the face, a wake-up call—pick your metaphor, but What Matters Most was what I needed.

Hollis is a follower of Carl Jung, so his view of the mind is that the ego—the conscious “voice in the head” that we take to be ourselves—is only a tiny part of the whole. Sure, it has all sorts of schemes it believes will make us happy and secure, usually involving large salaries, public acclaim, or flawless partners or children. Yet in reality (Hollis writes elsewhere) the ego is nothing but a “thin wafer of consciousness floating on an iridescent ocean called the soul”. The vast forces of the unconscious—the psyche, or “the gods” when Hollis is feeling more lyrical—have their own plans for us.

The task, for each person, is to figure out what they are, and then heed that call instead of resisting it.

Burkeman (and Hollis) make that sound easy, but I’m thinking this may be the hardest task I’ve ever set myself.

Then they drop this bomb on us:

At any major juncture in life, Hollis argues, we should ask: “Does this path, this choice, make me larger or smaller?” There’s something uncanny about this question, which has seen me through several dilemmas since discovering his work. The usual question is “Will this make me happy?” – but few of us, if we’re honest, have much of a clue about what will make us, or our loved ones, happiest. Ask whether a choice will make you larger or diminish you, though, and surprisingly often the answer’s obvious. Every choice, writes Hollis, demonstrating again his splendid refusal to be upbeat for the sake of it, represents a kind of death. So “when we get to junctures like that, we had better choose the dying that enlarges rather than the one that keeps us stuck”.

My recent readings on Stoicism will be a help.